Tad: """A few years ago, you couldn’t really do statistics in Python unless you wanted to spend most of your time pulling your hair out and wishing Python were more like R (which, is a pretty remarkable confession considering what R is like)."""

"Lately I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with programming in IDL: [...] I
find myself spending more and more time on “stupid stuff” like wrestling
with the ancient and limited plotting system, building very ugly GUIs
which nonetheless take vast amounts of cumbersome code to build, and
dealing with namespace conflicts between routines with identical names
in different libraries. Python is not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot
better than IDL in all of these aspects. Like I said, I’m only halfway
switched (and certain collaborations are going to keep me in IDL for
years, as will all my legacy code) but for new stuff Python seems like
it’s got the wind behind its sails."